Council's fiscal hawks look to take flight

The efforts by councillors Randy Donauer and Eric Olauson to reduce costs by lowering the number of new employees being sought got repetitive during Saskatoon budget talks.

But it did you make wonder – and there was plenty of opportunity for daydreaming as council and city officials discussed excruciating details of the budget – what council would be like without them.

Saskatoon might soon find out.

Both are seeking election to higher office – Donauer as a federal Conservative candidate and Olauson as a provincial Saskatchewan Party candidate – in campaigns slated to come in the next year and a half.Donauer and Olauson have positioned themselves as the fiscal hawks on council, consistently asking about costs throughout the city hall political process, whether at budget deliberations or at committee meetings.

They serve an important function, especially after last year’s 7.43 per cent tax hike – higher than Regina, Calgary, Winnipeg and Edmonton – followed by this year’s initial proposal of another increase of more than seven per cent for 2015.

Calgary’s increase for 2015 is 4.5 per cent, while Regina’s is 3.9 per cent.

In the end, Saskatoon got an increase of 5.34 per cent and you can give a fair share of credit to Donauer and Olauson that it was not higher – even though neither voted for the budget.

In this type of tax-hiking environment, the voices of fiscal hawks are vital.

It may not be fair to portray the rest of council as spendthrifts since discussions often focus on the price tag of a given initiative or programs.

However, Donauer and Olauson have definitely set themselves apart as guardians of the public purse.

It’s not difficult to imagine council approving two straight years of seven per cent increases without the fiscal pressure exerted by the pair.

Donauer reached a point of frustration in his crusade to see the number of new employees trimmed from the 2015 budget.

He strongly asserted his right to keep questioning administration officials about potential savings, insisting taxpayers “hired” him to do just that.

Donauer has also admitted he has had to adjust his approach to saving money. He originally wanted to try to address Saskatoon’s decrepit roads without a tax increase by finding savings elsewhere in the budget.

Now he’s had to adapt to a dedicated road levy, which was refinanced through other city revenues to lower the budget impact on taxpayers in 2015.

Value for money

Donauer and Olauson can seem one-dimensional at times, but if you view council as a whole, taxpayers are well-served by councillors who consistently want to make sure residents are getting value for their money.

It would be unfair not to give other councillors some credit, too.

Earlier this year, Zach Jeffries, Darren Hill and Charlie Clark questioned the financial sense of the contract awarded to Cosmopolitan Industries Ltd. for curbside recycling for townhouses and apartments.

Coun. Pat Lorje also made a last-minute effort to ditch the community support officers program to save some money. And Coun. Tiffany Paulsen voted against the 2015 budget, too.

More scrutiny placed on city hall spending, however, always ranks ahead of less scrutiny and one assumes that’s what we would get with Donauer and Olauson plying their trade at a higher level of government.

Presumably, they’d both be pressing for fiscal responsibility and belt-tightening at the federal and provincial levels, so maybe Saskatoon taxpayers would benefit anyway, but they would possess far less influence in larger governmental machines.

Much has been made of the proposal to reduce garbage collection to help limit the 2015 tax increase.

Consider earlier this year when city administration announced it was spending $1.2 million for electronic tags to help track the city’s 66,000 garbage bins – for a garbage pickup program that had a 99.5 per cent collection rate.

$1.2 million. 99.5 per cent.

A city official claimed annual savings could be as high as $200,000 a year and certainly there are legitimate reasons to track waste management, but this is the type of spending that needs greater scrutiny.

Spending like this is often shrouded in whether or not it will have an impact on the mill rate to determine whether property taxes get hiked or not.

More than seven per cent of spending in 2015 will go to servicing debt, so there is an ongoing cost to all those big capital projects, too.

Saskatoon has more tools in its fiscal toolbox than most municipalities, given its unusual involvement in land development and its operation of its own power utility.

There’s lots of room for money to be shuffled around as we saw when administration officials proposed refinancing the road repair program, but it’s also what makes fiscal hawks such an important part of the process.

ptank@thestarphoenix.com

@thinktankSK

Saskatoon Coun. Eric Olauson voted against the city’s 2015 budget after his many attempts to reduce the number of new employees failed.